Company News

John Simek Featured In Forensics Colleges Blog

May 26, 2020

Forensics Colleges blog featured an article titled “Forensics Casefile: Stopping the Craigslist Killer” highlighting forensics expert John Simek of Sensei Enterprises.

Excerpt:

“You don’t see many burglaries now, not in the traditional sense. The bad guys are going digital. They’re sitting behind their computers, with their keyboards…” John W. Simek, Vice President of Sensei Enterprises

On the night of April 14, 2009, Julissa Brisman showed up at a Boston hotel room, intending to give her new client a massage. The appointment had been set up through Craigslist. Upon arriving at the hotel room, however, Julissa’s client bound her, gagged her, robbed her, and then put bullets through her heart, her hip, and her lung.

This was the only murder committed by Philip Markoff, a man who would come to be known as the Craigslist Killer. But it wasn’t his only crime. Investigators soon connected Julissa’s murder to the armed robbery of an escort at another Boston hotel a few days prior. And just a few days later, they connected it yet again to an attempted robbery in a Rhode Island hotel. Investigators scanned through security footage from all three locations around the time of the crimes (which you can see for yourself, here).

From there, they identified what they believed to be the same man across all three: a young, tall, white male in a dark jacket and a baseball cap. But they still didn’t know who he was.

Many people in the student-rich city of Boston looked like Philip Markoff did: young, tall, and white. He was a 23-year-old medical student at Boston University, living with his fiancée, Megan McAllister, and subsisting purely off student loans. According to McAllister, he rarely left the house. To identify Markoff as the man in the surveillance footage—and thereby catch the Craigslist Killer—required the use of several forms of digital forensics.

Read the entire article here.